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Reactions to Selling a Better Life, in the November 5, 2012 print edition of Forbes Asia.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the detractors of Southeast Asian multi-level marketer Qnet and its controversial founder and chairman, Vijay Eswaran, came out in force. Our story Selling a Better Life attracted a great deal of attention, almost all of it positive and much of it overtly heartfelt. But a few voices echoed the dark allusions of fraud and shady dealing that have dogged this company almost since its inception.

These voices were heard last month – but not in our own Comments section. Crusading financial journalist Sucheta Dalal, co-publisher of personal investment and business news site Moneylife and a prominent blogger, has campaigned against MLMs in general and Qnet in particular for a number of years. Her stories start out from the premise that Qnet is a scam, with headlines such as “QNet, the MLM has resurfaced in India; will people be duped again?” on November 11, and “QNet, the MLM company, has no answers to Moneylife’s simple questions” on November 20. It also appears in her Twitter feed, in comments such as “Its pathetic how Qnet is leading people to financial ruin” on December 12.

She even aired the suggestion that Qnet paid Forbes Asia to run our story: “Several Qnet dealers pointing to Forbes endorsing QNet!! Waiting for #Forbes to clarify! is it paid news or real?” on November 19. A genuine concern in India, where stories in mainstream newspapers are in fact sometimes for sale.

In fairness, fans and foes of Qnet tend to agree on one thing: the purpose of our story was to ‘endorse’ Qnet, a motive that never occurred to any of the people involved in its reporting, research, editing, fact-checking, and production.

In particular Dalal has locked horns with Qnet’s head of corporate affairs, Zaheer Merchant, in a volley of charges and replies over everything from the legality of Qnet’s business model to basic facts on whether meetings between them did or did not take place. Words in this dialogue waged in cyberspace include bribe, liar, threatened, untrue, scheme, Ponzi, pyramid and so on.

The back-and-forth between them became so contentious, with Dalal’s fervid denunciations and Merchant’s icy denials, that we extended an offer to both to use this column, Eastern Exposure, as a neutral site. We promised Dalal we would publish her questions verbatim and demand straight answers from Qnet; we promised Merchant we would publish his explanations verbatim. And we would let the readers decide.

Regrettably, Dalal refrained from taking part. She also opted to not identify self-professed 'victims' of Qnet who, she says, came out in one of her for-pay seminars in Mumbai a few weeks ago. Merchant did the opposite; his reply to Dalal’s charges is below.

But first, an observation on reporting in the age of the Internet. The charges against Qnet, we found, tend to originate in apocryphal, anonymous or debunked sources. They then find their way into Wikipedia or news blogs, which are then cited as fact. For example, it’s widely reported that Eswaran was arrested and jailed in Jakarta in 2007, but far less often that the charges were ruled as spurious and dropped.

Publication of our story would, we expected, attract solid, credible information on Qnet’s misdeeds in our Comments section. More than 20,000 readers and 157 comments later, this has not happened.

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Letter from Zaheer Merchant to Forbes Asia, responding to charges in Moneylife, its Comments section, and in Sucheta Dalal’s Twitterfeed.

"We reply to Ms. Dalal's various carges and assertions:

Qnet has changed its name several times.

Companies change their names frequently for reasons such as branding, variations in lines of business, and marketing. In our case, this was done for strategic business purposes. When Qnet was founded in 1998 it offered only one product, commemorative gold coins. As the company added more products to its portfolio and the e-commerce platform evolved, the name GoldQuest was no longer suitable and it was changed to QuestNet and then shortened to QNet. Hundreds of companies all over the world have done the same sort of thing.

Disparaging information about Qnet must be accurate, because it’s in the Wikipedia entry.

We strongly dispute the credibility of the Wikipedia entry on Qnet. But we can’t do much about it: Wikipedia's policy does not allow a company representative, a PR agency or anyone with a stake in the matter to edit entries. We have lodged a complaint with Wikipedia administrators about the heavily bias of the entry and a debate has been opened up on their 'Neutral Point of view' noticeboard, that you can see here:

Please also note that Wikipedia is not considered an authentic source of information. Wikipedia is a public forum where anyone, even you can edit an entry. Unfortunately this has led to numerous quality problems for the portal which its founder Jimmy Wales admits himself. This has been acknowledged by leading media including the New York Times. You can read these two articles on the subject.

While the company was being investigated in Chennai, we experienced a significant amount of negative media exposure, especially in the newspapers in South India. Hence, in order to set the record straight and be able to provide a true picture of the company, we invited different publications to bust the myth that we were a fly-by-night operator with no credibility.

Journalists from several publications accepted this invitation and visited our Headquarters where they met with the global managing director of QNET and other senior officials of the company, visited our international customer support centre, our logistics facility from which thousands of products are shipped globally every single day, and also our training centre to watch an IR training in progress. They asked us questions in an open forum and we were able to respond to all their queries and concerns.

We fail to see how a simple invitation to review the entire operations and efficacy of the same can be termed as a "softening" process or any kind of a ‘bribe.’